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Etienne Deveaux
Noble Rioter
Player Information
Name: Jess
Contact Information: Classified.
Character Information
Name: Etienne Deveaux
Type: Noble
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Luthadel
Occupation: Supposedly he is Damien Deveaux' personal assistant and protege.
Relationship Status: Single
Powers:
-Type: Misting
-Metal(s) Used: Zinc
-Degree of Skill: Advanced
-Status: Hidden
Appearance: Etienne has the classic Deveaux features, with high cheekbones, dark brown hair with a slight wave, and dark eyes. His face is a little stronger than some Deveaux, with a touch of his mother's more raptorial structure, but it is softened by youth and his quick, ready grin. His face is very mobile and expressive, his spaniel-like eyes in particular conveying emotion easily.
He hasn't quite caught up with his height of six feet yet, and is rather lanky. He fidgets if forced to sit still, and will tap his fingers, bounce his foot, squirm, and/or chew the nib of his pen (which often results in inkstains at the right-hand corner of his mouth). Etienne dresses very well, like any Deveaux, but rather lazily; his cravat is a disgrace to his tailored suits, and he is a little hit-or-miss about buttoning his cuffs.
Special Skills: Reading, writing silly rubbish, dancing, drawing caricatures, procrastinating, wasting his own time and everyone else's, disappointing people.
Strengths: Etienne is good at making people laugh; this can endear him to people even when he completely frustrates them. He is a talented Rioter, which in combination with his natural appeal can result in considerable charm. He is also, underneath all the nonsense, highly intelligent and potentially capable.
Weaknesses: His most lamentable trait is an apparently complete purity of mind in the region where common sense ought to lie. He is determined to persuade others (and particularly Augustin Deveaux) that he is not, in fact, remotely worth any responsibility. He refuses to apply himself to anything, puts everything off until the last minute, and generally slacks off constantly.
Personality: Etienne has a pathological dislike of anything that approaches work. He is easily bored. He will do what he has to do, or what he is forced to do, only when he has absolutely no other choice. Procrastination til the last possible moment is his guiding principle. Etienne refuses to learn from the consequences of his decisions; he may be perfectly aware that something is his own fault, and how to avoid the same problem in the future, and simply not bother to make any effort in that vein.
Etienne is surprisingly empathic, and the emotions of others affect him more than he would like to admit. He doesn't like dealing with anything upsetting. It's hard for him to talk about something truly negative, he does not know the words to express himself, and he'll search for any way to change the subject. He is very rarely serious. Despite this, he genuinely cares about others, and dislikes seeing anyone hurt; he will try to fix things or help in his own way. Worst of all is when (as often happens) there is nothing that he can do.
He is protective over the people he cares about, but it is virtually impossible for Etienne to be threatening or aggressive; it's like a kitten trying to be a wolfhound. There are four centrally important people in his world. First is his younger sister Cataline. Second is his cousin Camille. Third is his cousin Lucille. Though he would deny this vehemently and is not fully aware of it, the fourth person is his cousin Damien.
He is very social; he likes people in general, and dislikes being left alone. Etienne has easy good manners when he chooses to employ them, and can be highly entertaining. Of course, he deliberately makes it hard for people to take him seriously. Grandiose and more than a little theatrical, Etienne is plainly full of utter nonsense, and he makes a lot of often very bad jokes. He is thoughtless and harebrained, racing into decisions at full tilt without looking where he is going. It's difficult for him to follow a straight line. He's still figuring out the whole flirting thing, and is not completely sure of how to talk to women. Underneath this, though, is a considerable intelligence, quick perception, and much more capability than he'd like anyone to know.
When covered by a Smoker, at least, he will use his abilities a little indiscriminately to get others to do what he wants, though he has a careful enough touch that he has not yet been revealed to the public. This is not malicious, and generally he Riots positive emotions, though he will also shamelessly inflate sympathy for his cause.
He has a deep-rooted grudge against House Deveaux, though he conceals this underneath the pure laziness. It began when he saw what was done to Camille. His sloth and tomfoolery is his small rebellion against the House. He may not be a Mistborn, but he has no desire to be used as anyone's tool. He is trying to convince Damien that he is a useless, lazy fool, so that Damien will tell Augustin the same thing, and then Deveaux will give up on him entirely.
History: Etienne Deveaux was born to Leon Deveaux and Katrien Vaudin, the first child of their marriage and like all Deveaux, he was raised with the expectation that he would one day be a credit to the house. Both Leon and Katrien had a strict philosophy of child-rearing, and Etienne - from the very start an adventurous child with a habit of getting into everything that he ought not to - proved to be quite a trial. As soon as he could crawl, he was crawling under and into everywhere he could fit in the Keep, and occasionally into places that boggled the mind as to how he could fit there. When he learned to walk, the problem was intensified. Despite the fact that servants would be detailed to keep an eye on him, Etienne had a talent for being where he did not belong.
He was quick and intelligent, and as he grew a little older, he learned rapidly. However, he had considerable difficulty sitting still long enough to be taught; nothing engaged him for long, and he wanted nothing more than to be out on the loose. Etienne had a true gift for finding trouble, and if he didn't find it on his own, it tended to find him. His first cousin, Camille - Cami - was his closest playmate. She was always far more well-behaved than Etienne, and acted as something of a mediating influence on him. Although he did his best to pull her into his capers in return, Cami was almost the only person who actually could stop the young Etienne from doing something stupid. Cami was Etienne's confidante, as well; she was the only person with whom he shared his dreams and flights of imagination. The two of them spun a future of adventures for themselves where they would be heroes. They were best friends.
They were six when they were both Snapped. Etienne had no idea what was going on when he was taken away, and given something sharp and foul-tasting to drink. He knew that he had probably done something wrong - it was always a good bet - but he did not know why they were so serious, or why several noblemen from the House were all gathered around; his father and Augustin Deveaux among them. And then the brutal beating began. Etienne struggled to escape, begged them to stop, but there was no mercy. The blows kept coming.
He was certain he was going to die, and he did not even know why; Etienne reached out with something else that he found within him in that moment of terror and desperation. Pity. Let me go. Mercy. Don't hurt me. He willed it at them, and they paused. There was an exclamation from someone - he couldn't even hear it, he was in too much pain - and then he was no longer aware of anything at all.
He was slow to recover; soon after he woke, his father told him that he had Snapped as a Rioter. He had heard about Allomancers, of course. Although he knew very little about what they were, or what they did, he had a vague idea that an Allomancer was a very good thing to be, and his father certainly seemed to be very proud. He'd never been particularly pleased with Etienne before, but this time he actually told Etienne so, as if Etienne had done something very important. It was hard to understand; Etienne couldn't forget that his father had just stood there, watching him, while they tried to kill him. But he said he was proud, and that Etienne would be a credit to his family and to the House.
Camille came to see him while he was still in his sickbed. The same thing had happened to her, she told him, only she seemed to have recovered much faster. She was a Mistborn, and she was very important now. Etienne wondered why he wasn't Mistborn; it would have been much nicer, because maybe he would have been up and better again quicker with pewter. Cami's visits helped, but Etienne's sickbed chafed at him, and when he was allowed out of it again he was so anxious to be up that he was happy even when he was immediately put to his studies, with something new to study as well, now... he had an Allomantic teacher in addition to his tutor.
This wasn't enough to make him not notice that he didn't see Cami much anymore. She didn't come to find him anymore, and when he finally went to go and look for her, she was strangely quiet; she didn't seem to want to talk at all, or to do much of anything. Etienne didn't know what was wrong. He tried his best to get a smile out of her, pulling out all his worst faces, stupidest jokes, and even showing her how he'd learned to walk on his hands, but the smile she gave him wasn't really even a smile at all, and he knew it.
After a while, she started to go back to normal, or at least it seemed like that at first. They played together like they had before, running about, and getting into and out of trouble. But gradually he realized something was different, something he did not understand, and the changes grew deeper as time went on. Cami was strange, now; she would say things sometimes that scared him. Not only that, but she no longer took an interest in the things they had planned for themselves once. She was Mistborn, she said, like she wasn't anything else at all anymore. There was a distance between them, but he didn?t know what it was or why it was there. It was all out of balance somehow, and wrong. She was all wrong.
He only understood how different she really was when he followed her one evening when she went away for training. No one noticed Etienne as he crept along quietly behind the others, keeping his distance, on their way down to the network of dungeons underneath Keep Deveaux. No one noticed that after they shut the door to the room, Etienne put his eye to one of the cracks in the heavy wooden door, and saw his cousin unleashed. There were skaa men and women there, given weapons, and pitted against her in the arena. A few of them tried to fight; most of them only tried to run away from Cami, but there was nowhere to run to. Etienne only saw part of it before he ran away, but he had seen enough that he would never forget it. He crept away from the training arena, off into the maze of dungeons, and vomited what seemed like everything he had ever eaten; he stayed hidden in the corner he had found for hours, crying. They were only nine years old.
He tried to block out what he had seen that night, but he could not get it out of his head; he had nightmares for weeks following. Etienne started to avoid Cami. When she came to track him down, he would find excuses not to play; he would be too tired, or busy, or he meant to go to Keep Tekiel to play with Aldwin and Kardin and girls weren't allowed because they had cooties. She gave up after a while, and stopped playing with him. He never saw her playing at all after that. Once, some weeks later, he heard Augustin talking to her; he praised her for how well she was performing in her training. Cami was a true credit to Deveaux.
His younger sister Cataline was just beginning to be an age where she was actually interesting, however. At five years old, she wasn?t a squalling baby or a toddler that threw her food everywhere anymore, but astonishingly, Etienne realized she was actually a person, and she could be his friend. What was more, she had all kinds of interesting ideas, and the two of them together could raise ten times the amount of mischief that one alone could do. Brother and sister did their best to turn Keep Deveaux upside down, and Etienne's life began to come back into balance.
It was a year later that Etienne overheard Augustin Deveaux and his father speaking together...about Cataline's Snapping. She was six years old now, the usual age at which Deveaux tested their children. Because Etienne had already Snapped, they had high hopes that Cataline might carry Allomancy as well. It was planned for later that day.
It was the first time Etienne had ever said anything remotely serious to Cataline. "Don't Snap," he told her. "Whatever you do, don't Snap, please. They're going to hurt you to try to make you do it, but you can't burn any metals, you can't be an Allomancer, you can't."
"But why? Everyone says it's a good thing to be an Allomancer," she asked, looking up at him in complete confusion.
"It's not. It's not it's not it's not. I wish I wasn?'t one, I wish there wasn't any such thing as Allomancy at all. Please, Cataline, just listen to me." He was desperate for her to understand, and he couldn't explain why it was so important. He couldn't tell her everything.
"Um, all right. Don't cry, 'kay?"
"I'm not crying," Etienne protested, swiping at his eyes, and sniffling. This didn't convince her at all, and she wrapped her arms around him in a hug. "Yes you are."
"No I'm not!" he protested, holding on to her anyway. He was; he couldn't stop.
"When you Snap it's when you think you're going to die and then you feel something inside you, something warm in your stomach. And then you reach for that, because it's all you have. If you feel that, don't use it. They won't really kill you, it's all a big lie, because they just want to hurt you until you Snap." She clung to Etienne more tightly, with a quiet whimper; he'd scared her now, but she had to know. She had to know now before they got her, and then she would be less afraid then. And maybe she wouldn't Snap. "Just remember it?s a lie and they want to trick you. Don't do what they want."
"I'm scared," she whispered, her head buried in his coat.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Cat, I can't protect you, I can't make them leave you alone. But it'll be all right. It's going to hurt worse than anything but just remember it'll be all right and you're going to be fine. You have to be really brave."
It was not long after that before they came for her, just like they had for Etienne. The two children were pried apart from one another, and Cataline was dragged away, while another of their relatives held on to Etienne. Alain Deveaux' hand still has the scar where Etienne sunk his teeth into him.
Because of his outburst, he was not allowed to see his sister after her Snapping, while she was under the care of the Deveaux physician. That did not stop him from going to see her anyway. He snuck in through the window of her sickroom that night, and found her still awake, unable to sleep for the pain after her dose of laudanum had worn off. She had been badly beaten... worse even than he had, because they had pushed her farther, but she had not Snapped. She was not an Allomancer. Etienne felt as if a weight had been taken from his shoulders, although it hurt him to see Cat in that much pain. He stayed with her for the rest of that night, holding her hand, until the morning came and he had to clear out before they caught him in there.
After that, there was a change in Etienne. Previously, it had been easy for him to get bored in the schoolroom, but he would actually do his work. Now he performed his studies in only the most perfunctory fashion, sometimes even not doing them at all. He was never malicious, but simply acted like a complete idiot in everything. He made himself ridiculous, a laughingstock; he took nothing seriously at all. Etienne was determined not to be a credit to Deveaux.
He intended to prove himself useless, and get Augustin Deveaux to give up on him completely.
Cataline and Etienne continued to be an inseparable team as they grew up together. They were partners in crime, scheming together to shake up the House and Luthadel. Almost no one was safe from their pranks, though they took care to cover their tracks quite well, and never went too far. Together, they also built a world of games and imagination for themselves, though Etienne no longer believed in any kind of heroic future for himself. He was no hero and he knew it; he had given up that kind of dream. His greatest ambition now was to be nothing important at all.
As he grew older and came to understand more of what had happened, of just what had been done to his cousin, he tried to reach out to Cami again. He was still a little afraid of her, but with age came realization and guilt. Etienne had been her last real friend, and he had been too afraid to stay near her. He had failed her. Now the metamorphosis was complete; he no longer even knew who his cousin was at all. There were no traces of the Cami he had grown up with in her. All the same, Etienne tried to rekindle some kind of friendship. For her part, she was willing to spend time with him. They would talk, spend time, and sometimes even laugh together. However, Etienne never was able to bridge the distance, no matter how he tried.
Despite repeated discipline from Deveaux, Etienne did not settle down at all; his nonsense only became more pronounced. He was too much of a handful for his tutors to put up with; one after another resigned in protest at his foolishness. Etienne shamelessly used his Rioting on them to increase their frustration, until he bragged to Cataline that he could get rid of any tutor inside of a month; his record was driving one off inside of only two days.
Eventually, Augustin lost all patience with Etienne?s behaviour, and with the arrival of Damien Deveaux in Luthadel, a convenient solution appeared to have presented itself. Etienne was summoned into Augustin's study, and summarily informed of the new arrangement. Aware - or at least supposing - that this was his last chance, Etienne felt a certain sense of triumph. All he had to do was blow this one, and they ought to be done with him once and for all.
"Nunky." Etienne gave a flourishing, elaborate bow to the head of House Deveaux. "I'm genuinely remorseful this time; I think I might feel the beginnings of a reformation. I think I'll try for two weeks."
"You will try for as long as you are told to," was Augustin?s only response; he did not even look up at Etienne. His eyes focused on the papers in front of him, he dismissed Etienne curtly. "That is all."
If Augustin had been looking at that moment, he might have noticed the flash of fire behind the laughter and self-mockery in Etienne's eyes. But he was not looking, and in a second Etienne had broken his gaze away, sweeping another bow. "Til next time, Nunky." He was determined that next time would not be long; he would fail spectacularly. Even Damien Deveaux, mistborn or not, could not alter his determination.
Once under Damien's thumb, Etienne continued right along in his usual ways; he began by simply giving up before starting, intending to set himself up as a failure from the beginning. Unfortunately, he discovered on the very first day that Damien was able to keep him effectively imprisoned inside the office. It was not fair at all; the door had metal parts, and Damien was a mistborn. The window was above a sheer drop of several stories, and there were no other exits. At first, Etienne supposed he only needed to outlast Damien's steel, but he discovered that both Damien's steel and his patience were a great deal more considerable than he had supposed; Damien had a stock of vials waiting in his desk and seemed to have foreseen the situation. He ended up spending that first night and a good portion of the next day, trapped in the room with a silent Damien and nothing to eat except what amounted practically to soldier's field rations, which Damien had thoughtfully stored ahead of time in the office. The strategy eventually won out. Etienne was never good at dealing with deprivation. He finished the assignment, and lost the first battle. It was a bad precedent.
But he was still determined to win the war.
His cousin Lucille's presence in the keep brightened up his days considerably, and helped to balance out the problems that Damien was causing for him. He and Cataline almost instantly made friends with her; she was between them in age, and Etienne couldn't help liking her. She was unlike the rest of Deveaux; she was kind-hearted, cheerful, and always optimistic. There was just something special about her, and Etienne rapidly adopted her into his central circle of favourite people.
Roleplay Sample
Etienne's eyes traveled back and forth between the paper detailing the analysis he was expected to write (an absolute monster of a report; he had been given the assignment a week ago and had been happily avoiding it ever since) and Damien's icy gaze. He put his head on one side and smiled brightly, without flinching away from that stare. Etienne was quite used to that sort of expression. Reaching for zinc, he burned it, and Rioted Damien's sense of happiness and companionship (he sincerely hoped they existed somewhere inside that expressionless mask), intending to remind his cousin of just how much he ought to like Etienne. He really ought to let him off the hook. It was cruel and unusual punishment to do something like this to such a bright young spirit. Etienne silently willed him to think these things.
"It can wait!" he said, cheerfully.
Damien's face might as well have been carved from stone for all the impression he made. "No. Now." The Rioting seemed to be having no effect. Had his cousin turned on his copper? That simply wasn't fair.
Etienne's smile slipped a little, though he rescued it as soon as he realized it was faltering. "It's not due for another week," he pointed out. "And I work better under pressure. I'm always best at the last minute. See? Logic."
There was a pause, then..."All right." Success! He was agreeing. Damien was actually agreeing. The smile had worked; his cousin had a heart after all! Etienne exulted, even as Damien went on, "I want it tomorrow, then." Putting it off to starting tomorrow meant another step towards putting it off to starting the day after tomorrow. This was a capital beginning.
With an enormous grin, Etienne replied promptly, "Tomorrow!"
Damien added, "Finished tomorrow, that is. On my desk."
Etienne waved a hand negligently, the words having not really registered. "Ab-so-lutely. Of course it will be." And silence fell as Etienne's brain began to catch up with his mouth. Damien was simply watching him. It slowly began to sink in what Damien had actually said, and the pause extended further before Etienne blurted, "Wait. What?"
"I want it tomorrow."
Dismay began to creep into Etienne's expression. The report would be at least twenty pages, at the bare minimum... which, of course, was precisely what he would do; catch him doing any more than that...but that was twenty pages. "That's impossible!"
"You wanted to wait until the last minute, did you not?" Damien clearly did not understand the basic concept of procrastination. Etienne attempted to enlighten him.
"The last minute," he explained, "means the last minute, and it means waiting, not moving the last minute forward." He spread his hands, with a distressed expression and a full-force Rioting of sympathy as he pleaded. "I need...time to mull it over. To process it. Think very profoundly about it."
"You'd best start mulling, then. Tomorrow."
"These kinds of deep thoughts, they don't just happen overnight!"
"Whether they happen or not, your work will. Life doesn't wait on deep thoughts, Etienne."
How could he be so unfeeling and heartless? This was past unfair, this was inhumane. Tomorrow? "You can't do this to me! It will be terrible, shoddy work, slapdash and dreadful. I shall be ashamed of it."
"Such are the consequences of waiting until the last minute. You made this choice for yourself."
This was patently untrue, which Etienne promptly pointed out. "That's - I did not! You moved the last minute! That was you, not me. It'll be your fault."
"And when would it have been done if I had allowed you to put it off?" Damien settled back in his chair, distressingly calm and unmoved by Etienne's sound and convincing argumentation.
"Why, of course, it would have been done in two weeks. Maybe two weeks and a day."
"Exactly." He leaned back over his own work, tapping the desk in front of him. "Tomorrow."
"It's impossible. I shan't do it. I can't."
"Whether you can or you can't is of no concern to you. It needs to be done, and so you will do it."
Etienne's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. What?! He had just plainly said it was far too difficult; Damien expected him to do something that was out of the realm even of possibility? "- But!"
Damien was pitiless. "No arguing. You're not stupid, Etienne. Nothing is stopping you from doing it. Just sit down and get it over with. And stop complaining about it."
"I have a date tonight! What am I going to tell her? This is unjust."
"What's unjust is doing shoddy work for no other reason than laziness. Tomorrow, Etienne. If you wish to enjoy your date tonight, I suggest getting as much done now as you can."
"You forgot talentless." Damien needed to be reminded of this, evidently, as well.
"I spoke as I intended to."
"Hence, you forgot it." He waved one hand.
"You heard me, Etienne. I'm done talking about this."
Etienne tried another tack, as he was having no results from this. "Look, Damien - you know, you'd far rather have a report that's carefully considered. Meaningful. Like a work of art, or a poem; it would be a beautiful thing. If I just have more time. It would be eloquent. The words and numbers would sing to you."
Damien's face remained calm, but a subtle note...was that approval?... entered his voice. This was a bad sign. "Much better. You're learning." Fortunately, the approval disappeared after that, and he was a stern lecturer again. "But. That doesn't change anything; your more mature approach came too late, for one thing. That won't work after you've tried arguing and complaining your way out of it. Not on me, and certainly not on any business partners you may have in the future." He tapped his desk again. "Tomorrow." Damien returned to his own work, effectively closing the conversation.
".......Fine. You asked for it." Etienne glared at him, took up his pen and paper, and apparently began to get to work. About an hour later, there was minimal actual writing of the report done, several doodles (including a caricature of Damien with evil eyes and a malevolent expression) and Etienne's head had fallen forward onto his arms, sleeping gently and soundly.
Edited by KChan, 27 January 2016 - 04:40 AM.
